Low FPS? Killer Rig.. any ideas?

[rcmunro22]

Hey all, just reinstalled med2 and decided to try SS6.4/BFTB2.0. Man, love the mods, really great work. However I have noticed in several battles my frames dropping below 20 in fight that are not large (less than 1,000 men)

Now before you say turn off permanent arrows and lower your settings understand I have a beast of rig.

I run Shogun 2 on ultra with over 3,000 man battles and don't drop below 40fps.

I was more wondering is there maybe something else at work here.. additional textures from all the modding maybe? Something along those lines..

If your insistent it's my rig or setup here is (which plays BF3 at over 160fps on ultra).

2x NVIDIA GeForce 570Oced SLI
24GB Patriot DDR3 RAM
3.4Ghz i7 975 Quad Core Extreme Edition Processor (has a Water Cooling system).
OCZ RevoDrivex2 Raid Driver.. lets just say it's FAST

Point being.. vanilla version of this game my rig laughs at. Why are my fps dropping.. I did notice that my GPU usage for both cards is not really above 40%.. any ideas? Maybe a compatibility issue?

Would appreciate some help, thanks.

[Caesar Clivus]

Try disabling the borderless windowed mode in the SS config file. That can help a bit.

[rcmunro22]

Interesting, thanks for the tip I may try that. Doesn't seem to be a consistent problem which is odd, tends to occur more in large sieges it seems.

[Sleepepro]

I've noticed that fps drops a lot during siege battles, so I'm guessing it has something to do with the buildings if this occurs a lot during siege battles

[The Bold Burgundian]

It could be the fact that the Medieval 2 engine is very dated, its so old it only uses one core, so your quad/duel core is not used fully. This is the killer for me, if I could use all cores I could have very large battles!

[Losthief]

install directx9 onto your computer (it won't overwrite newer, just installs it alongside, but runs mtw2 better) (this would be my guess as to the problem).
disable anti-aliasing (this eliminates your computer trying to 'smooth' edges, such as buildings in your siege battles).
Turn off shadows in battles, as they're not really that important.
Lastly, turn off the sky, as it doesn't really change the game too much.

At that point...everything else would affect units/appearance above the minimum which i assume you don't want.

Also you can lower your in game resolution which will directly affect fps, but eliminates borderless window mode.

let me know how this works for you, also its not a core issue, 3.4ghz is plenty, and more importantly the cpu is more towards turn times, the battles have much more to do with ram and graphics.

[Rakoua]

Actually I'd assume it's a cpu problem, due to the M2TW only using one core. Animations, permanent arrows, all those things take up CPU power. Removing permanent arrows would help. I've had situations like that with my laptop, when lowering graphics doesn't do anything to the FPS since the card is powerful enough, but the CPU which is not used to its full potential starts lagging.

At least that's what I think.

[Hammerchuckery]

Make sure that your nvidia control center isn't setting the game with AA 4/8x. That was my problem.

i7 @ 1.6 is fine with Huge AA 2x, AF 16x, and everything High/Highest (except shadows). Max at about 5k-ish 4000 models on the field even perm. arrows. I just love a field littered with burning arrows.

[jaaaah]

I got a very new rig (i5 2500K, GTX 580) whole computer is built for overclocking with pre-overclocked or high quality components. I turned on GPU and CPU performance monitor and cranked my processor up to 5GHz to check the difference running HUGE battles in medieval 2. This particular battle was around 27K men large and still my GTX 580 was only taxed up to around 30-40% on the GPU-core and around 700mb on the memory. While the processor was running 100% on 1 core obviously, but still this was at 5GHz ^^

Also permanent arrows I cannot recommend if you use large units. I tried a 1v1 battle with archers with unit size 200+ and its super smooth when the battle is first loaded, but after a few rounds of all those archers firing at each other my CPU starts to struggle with that of arrows permanent stuck in the ground. Ofc that was a extreme test but still

[wolfslayer]

It would be interesting to know if you experience cpu lag or video lag.

CPU lag is pretty easy to recognise in large battles, usually a long intermittent pause, I get when 5+ stacks in settlement battle, the cpu is computing all the unit and settlement anims: ..................__..................__................. <...example of the timing ;-) on older systems the cpu just can't keep up with the computations so there is a pause usually at a regular interval, while the cpu "catches up".

As units die off, the pausing stops since the cpu doesn't have to compute the dead unit animations, only the body location.


Video lag, video memory overload, is easy to spot in large battles, if you move your view away from the main action and units the frame rate resumes back to acceptable,.

Or move to the center of a large battle and rotate your view in a circle, the game will "stutter" something like ........._.._.._........._.._.._......... as the game swaps video and system memory, and is writing to the page file.

Overload both system and video memory and the game will just CTD; it can't read/write to the page file fast enough to keep up.

Has anyone ever run FPS comparisons on borderless windowed and fullscreen? It would be interesting to see if the difference in performance is substantial.